Four Eyes
by RK Ryune
Summary: Somewhere between the bright flashes of light from his clothes and the dancers chucking him into walls, Sora's vision finally tanked.


It began with math class.

Well, that is to say, Sora couldn't read the book. Kairi looked over her shoulder to see Sora with his nose buried in between the pages, squinting at the page intently, before he put the book down and wrote the numbers on his paper. He solved the problem with his face incredibly close to the desk, hunched over and concentrating intently. She turned around in her seat and whispered, "what are you doing, Sora?"

"The numbers are blurry," he said with a frown, screwing his fists into his eyes and returning to his intense peering. Kairi turned back to her own desk work, frowning a little in concern.

Riku was the next to notice. The three of them had gone to a café after school for ice cream, and Kairi and Riku had long set down their menus. Sora was still staring at his own, pulling it closer and closer to his face. "Are you okay, Sora?" Riku said, voice laced with concern. Sora glanced up sharply, the menu snapping closed as he put it down hastily.

"I'm fine Riku, why do you ask?" he said, forcing himself to grin. He ordered a plain vanilla cone, even though Kairi and Riku both knew that he would have loved to order the Peanut Butter Rocket the minute he had seen it.

Finally, his mom said something. He was sitting at the kitchen table, laboring over his science text book and pausing ever few minutes to rub his eyes and pull the book closer to his face. "Sora," she said, coming to his side and pulling the book away from his face. "Did you forget how to read while you were gone?"

Sora blinked, and waved his hands in front of him in denial. "I can read just fine, Mom!" he blurted. "I can totally see the street signs and all that perfectly!"

"You've spent ten minutes on one page, dear," she replied patiently, pointing out the obvious fact that Sora had been trying to ignore. His shoulders sagged in defeat – he couldn't deny the fact that his mom was right.

"I can't see the page very well – the letters are all blurry," he admitted, looking off to the side in shame.

His mom picked up the phone and promptly made an eye exam appointment for the following afternoon.

And so, Sora spent his Thursday afternoon in a dimly lit room, repeating yes or no whenever the technician flipped the lens, testing to see which he could see better through. He did the standard test where he stood on the far wall and read letters off the big chart with one eye closed (he was surprised as to how pretty much the entire bottom half was unreadable). He tried not to flinch when the doctor smeared orange goop in his eye and inspected his eyes. Sora felt like he'd go blind from the bright light of the opthamaloscope.

At the end of the exam, Sora was diagnosed with 20/100 vision and was given a prescription for glasses. "Even so, Sora," the doctor said, forming a steeple with his fingers, "I don't understand why your vision would deteriorate so quickly. The last time I saw you, you had nearly perfect eyesight. Did something happen in the last two years, perhaps excessive exposure to flashing lights, or did you injure your eyes in any way, or any concussions to the head…?"

Sora sighed and admitted that all three had happened in the last year. To himself, he concluded that, while potions and cure magic could stop bleeding, fix broken bones, and restore him to perfect health, they just couldn't fix nerve damage – and if the charts in the doctor's office were right, the eyes were the most sensitive and easily damaged nerves of all. The doctor forbade him to get contacts, on grounds of the fact that his eyes were STILL likely recovering from his adventure.

So Sora and his mom went to the glasses crafter adjoining the doctor's office and filled his prescription.

Sora didn't tell Riku and Kairi the next day at school.

In a week's time, Sora's glasses arrived by mail. They were small and rectangular, with thin frames, not tremendously noticeable at all. And the minute that they were on his face, the haze he'd been living in for the last month or however long it had been cleared in an instant. He did his homework, completing it in record time since he didn't have to labor over the words. By the end of the night, though, his head was throbbing. Headaches had become a normal occurrence, due to eye strain, but this was a different kind of headache. Sora removed his new glasses, set them on the table by his bed, fished a potion left over from his journey out of the magic pants Flora, Fauna and Merryweather had given him, chugged it, and went to bed.

The next morning, he tried to slip out of the house without the glasses, but his mom was ever-watchful and caught him just as he was about to leave. "Sora," she said slowly, "where are your glasses?"

"Oh, uh, I guess I forgot," Sora said with a sheepish laugh as he turned around to trudge back up the stairs and retrieve his glasses. He jammed them onto his face, and pocketed the beige case they had come in. He headed back downstairs, kissed his mom and wished her goodbye, and then headed off to school.

As he made his way down the winding path that lead from his house into town, he imagined up excuses to Riku and Kairi as to why he was wearing glasses. If he told them that heartless and being thrown into walls by Dancers and bright magic-clothes-induced flashes of light, among other things, were the cause, he knew they'd worry and insist he go and make sure nothing else was wrong with him. He mulled it over more – Riku would tease him mercilessly, Kairi would stand there and giggle and probably think he was a huge nerd. His insides twisted as he thought about Riku and Kairi, wondering what would happen if Kairi thought Riku was cooler, if…

Well, there was an easy solution to that. He pulled the offending lenses off of his face, stuck them inside their case, and proceeded as if they never existed. When Kairi and Riku met up with him at the crossroads, turning toward the small school they all attended, Sora greeted them as if nothing were wrong.

And then it was the weekend. Sora invented excuses to not go to the play island with Riku and Kairi, claiming that he needed to clean his room, that he still needed to wrap up some of the remedial work that he'd missed during his year-long absence, that his mom and dad wanted to spend time with him. It was all true, so Riku and Kairi bought it without objection, and admitted that they had things to do with their families as well. Sora spent the weekend at home with his parents, and with his glasses on his face. By Sunday night, he was used to them, to the point where they didn't give him headaches anymore.

Monday was different. Sora removed his glasses once again before meeting with his friends, and struggled through the school day as he always had – stumbling over words in literature, misreading formulas in science, repeating the ritual of squint-peer-write-solve in math. By the end of the day, his eyes were sore, his head hurt, and he was, in general, worn out. But he bore it with a smile on his face, and bid Riku and Kairi a salient good-bye as he turned up the path to his house. The rest of the week continued in the same fashion. Sora wore his glasses at home, and took them off at school.

Finally, after about a week-and-a-half, his two friends confronted him. "Sora, it's almost painful to watch you in math class," Kairi told him, chewing on her thumbnail with worry. "Even the teacher asked me to say something to you, it's sort of distracting."

Riku nodded. "Tidus also told me how you get when you're called on in literature class. He said you stumble over really easy words sometimes, like you can't see the book."

"I can see the book!" Sora protested, waving his hand.

Riku and Kairi looked at each other, and then Riku took several steps backward, until he was a good distance away. "How many fingers am I holding up, Sora?" he called.

Sora could barely make out Riku's form – he was just a white, blue and peach blob. Sora squinted and tilted his head, trying to concentrate and make sense out of what he knew was Riku, much less decipher how many fingers were being held up on the peachy-stick-thing that Sora was guessing was Riku's arm. "Um, three?" he guessed lamely.

Riku and Kairi exchanged glances, and Riku lowered his arm, curling just his index finger back into his fist, instead of the three fingers Sora thought were there. "Sora, you need to get your eyes checked," Kairi chided. "Riku was only holding up one finger."

One? Oh man, now Sora felt really dumb. And knowing Riku and Kairi, they'd harass him until they had verification and a note from the doctor. He sighed in defeat and dug into his pocket, turning away from them to put his glasses on. He turned around to face them, sulking and praying that they wouldn't laugh.

Instead, Riku nodded. "Way better," he said, then grinned. "Dummy, did you think we'd not let you be our friend because you look weird? You're already weird-looking, why would glasses change that?" Sora frowned and play-punched him in response.

Kairi separated the two boys. "Sora doesn't look silly, Riku," she said with an exasperated groan. "But," she remarked, frowning at Sora, "how long have you had those?"

"Er, about two weeks." Riku and Kairi both folded their arms and gave Sora an admonishing frown.

"We're your friends, silly, why would glasses change that?" Kairi said, finally smiling.

"Yeah," Riku added. "If anything, this makes it better because now I can call you stuff like 'Four-eyes'"

Sora gaped in dismay. "Don't call me that!" he protested. Riku laughed, and assured Sora he was only teasing.

"But, really, Sora, why hide it?"

Sora frowned. "Heroes don't wear glasses," he said, grasping for straws. "I mean, it's not very intimidating when your enemy has GLASSES on."

Riku snorted. "I doubt the heartless will ever care what you've got on your face. And I bet you that at least half of the Organization wore glasses, at least for reading. You know what a bunch of science-y types they were."

"Yeah, and the rest probably don't CARE, at least not unless you're Roxas," Kairi added.

In the recesses of Sora's subconscious, Roxas cringed, imagining exactly what manner of inventive insults Axel could come up with were HE the bespectacled one instead of Sora.

The trio had reached the ice cream café, and sat down at their usual table. The waitress greeted them cheerfully, handed them all menus, and over laughter and sweets, the three friends joked and smiled, like nothing had ever been wrong between them, the issue of whether or not Sora wore glasses forgotten.

Sora ordered a Peanut Butter Rocket.


End file.
